Dndorks Crew Blog

DDO News: Module 3 is Coming!

2006-10-11T23:33:00Z

Its getting pretty exciting, the amount of improvements and adjustments are going to be even huger than module 2 was.

The latest news is that warforged will now receive their full tabletop benefits at first level, no need to use enhancements to gain them. This should make playing warforged pretty cool, despite the fact that most people don't like having to use twice as much heal magic.

DDO, and other current MMOs I'm playing

2006-06-07T22:02:00Z

So its been about a month since I logged into DDO, yet recent revelations have made me decide to wait it out, and hope that I'm in a better time position by the time Module 2 comes out.

Whats given me hope? It "seems" that the developers over at Turbine have either realized that veering closer to the D&D rules will create a more balanced game than going more towards being a standard MMO or they've recently developed the technology to handle p&p rules more realistically. I come to this conclusion due to a couple recently announced changes, the most relevent which is the change to the stealth system.

In the old stealth system, if you attacked a creature while stealthed, the creature became aware of you permanently. Even running around a corner and re-stealthing wouldn't stop the aggro of the creature, which would head towards you in a straight line. This included attacking while being improved invisible. In the new system, creatures have to follow the spot/listen rules to find stealthed creatures, even if that stealthed creature is attacking it!

This is, I hope, just the first step in diversifying combat so that the non-tanks can have a hope at more strategic battles. Right now the most competent classes in DDO are often fighters, due to the combat-heavy nature of the game, I'd like to see some groups going through dungeons stealthed and having an entirely different combat strategy than the "tanks".

And don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that wants DDO to use p&p rules as written, I think nearly all of the rules have to be adapted for a real-time experience, I just think that whenever possible the actual numbers should try to imitate p&p so as to take advantage of the years of balance testing.

Drow, new stealth system, solo play, I think a couple more areas outside of StormReach, and of course mind flayers. :) Mmmmm, mind flayers. I really hope to get into DDO in July.

As for the few hours of spare time I have now? City of Heroes/ Villains. Issue 7 just came out and I'm looking forward to leveling up an electric melee brute, as well as exploring the new graphics in City of Heroes.

Of course there is always the ever-present Eve Online, which no one thinks I play, but its just that I only log on a few times a week and mostly to manage our corporate mercantile empire. ;)

New feature new feature new feature...but no spell vault?!?

2006-05-26T05:20:00Z

Dang, the spell vault kept spiraling larger, and its going to be really cool, but I keep getting pulled into other projects. :( The forum skin was just ugly in many ways, it was only half done and it would have been very difficult to fix.

Plus webcomic.net had to deal with the standard skin for a long time, which I didn't like because it wasn't doing anything to "brand" the site. it "will" get done, and it will hopefully be cool, have patience everyone!

Day ...something 4?5? Frustration reigned today

2006-05-07T06:29:00Z

So I was trying to use this nifty cool http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/CascadingDropDown/CascadingDropDown.aspx instead of the copout atlas:updatepanel to create a set of dropdowns that cascaded (ie game type, class type, spell lists).

I spent all day off and on, trying to get it to work, but to no avail. And worse, no error message! :(

I "did" early on figure out how to get it to work if I moved the datasource out of the web service and into the page itself, but the problem there was that it had to post the "entire" page to extract the data, kind of defeating the point of snappy no-refresh updates.

When I'm using new technology, I normally assume I am doing it wrong, so I rewrote it from scratch several times, downloaded samples, etc. Then I started hunting through the code it was generating, and managed to get an error message, and it was a security related error, not a coding issue. Sure enough, less than 2 minutes later I had it working, and now its nifty super fast cool. ;)

The only problem I'm worried about is whether it works in Safari. :(

The whole problem was the tool I was using was disabled for "security" reasons. Bah, it could have told me that. :(

Day 3 Spell Vault

2006-05-03T16:20:00Z

I've found that "naming" concepts while programming helps me to work on the project, as well as to explain to others what I'm working on.

Calling the member submitted area the spell vault helped solidify to me what I was working on, before that it was just a series of pages, many of which could be called similar things. Of course its nice for branding as well.

_________________________________________________________

I woke up early today at 6am, got some work done on the spell vault, renamed a couple things, improved the spell lookup a bit, and created a stored procedure that allows spells to be added to the character's known list of spells.

I do have something I am pondering though. Instead of merely making public spells available to everyone but editable by the submitter, maybe they should be editable by all registered users? Like a wiki I'd keep a copy of each change to a public spell, so if someone messed it up, the spell vault librarian (moderator) could just roll it back to a previous version.

Would it install more participation by people spellchecking and/or clarifying spells? Or would it merely end up with the entire list corrupted constantly by people playing?

It would be a bit more work, but I think it would probably be for the best. I looked at a wiki yesterday and someone had defaced it. I thought hey, I've never used a wiki before, maybe I can fix it. I clicked on update, but couldn't find the profanity. I went back and refreshed the page, and someone else had already fixed it. It kind of gave me hope for humanity, that the number of people who cared to fix it seemed to outweigh the number of jerks childishly ruining the site.

Any thoughts anyone?

Day 2 of the Spell Management System

2006-05-02T16:56:00Z

I woke up at 6:30am this morning and really churned out some more code. At this point I can add and edit spells and spell lists for the overall member.

Next I need to make a button that allows spells to be added to "spells known" for a given character.

Once thats done, I need to add a button that allows people to "report" abuse which will just queue a moderator list with spells/spell lists that need to be reviewed.

Next will be the actuall spell sheet for the character.

At that point I'll upload what I have to the website and put it in beta, and try and bug Jason to pretty it up some.

hopefully we'll get some heavy usage out of it in the first few days, iron out all the major bugs, and then that will be that. :)

First Post!

2006-05-01T17:30:00Z

heh, I always am tempted to make a "first post" comment on the comic comments when I know Jenn is adding the comic. ;)

This blog is more or less just for the dndorks crew to rant about gaming stuff without filling up the main page with extra things. Basically medium-small rants go on the site, medium-long posts go here. These posts tend to stay longer and aren't connected with the comic itself.

At any rate, I wanted to point out something to those that are visual studio users.

If for some reason you are working over a period of weeks with Visual Studio 2005, and at some point every time you hit save it gets "very" slow, painfully slow, the kind of slow that makes you want to throw your monitor through the window. Well, you may be experiencing a pretty simple problem to fix.

Basically at some point your list of prior solutions might point to a solution that no longer exists. This is the list that you choose from when you first start VS2005.

To fix it, open regedit, and navigate to Hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/visual studio/8.0/projectMRUList There you'll find a list of registry entries that define what you see in that list of solutions. I just deleted them all, you may want to pick and choose.

I encountered this issue with dndorks. 5-10 seconds each time I hit save. Searched on Google, found this page: http://blogs.dotnetcoders.com/jfoster/SolvingAPainfullySlowSaveProcessInVisualStudio2005.aspx

And realized I had an identical issue, which I had been dealing with at home for about 2 weeks, and it had been seriously dissuading me from wanting to work on the site.

So, what was I working on? The Spell List Manager for the Character Vault!

And let me tell you, once I fixed the save slowness, my work output dramatically increased!

Here is how the spell manager works

Spells are organized by spell list, Spell Level (0-9 and a 10th category referred to as None), and public or non-public.

Spell Lists are submitted by users, and can be flagged as public. Spells likewise are submitted by users and can be flagged as public.

Characters can be given spells and how many they have prepared from the overall pool of self-submitted and other public spells.

This way, the community as a whole can pool their efforts into adding spells to the vault, hopefully reducing how much time people have to spend typing in their spells.

Ideally I'll also have a CSV import option available, with instructions on what kind of format is needed .

There will also be the option to "report" spells, in case someone just starts putting in junk. Maybe we can get someone to become the spell moderator to help us keep the entries inline.

How long on this feature? It will probably go into beta by this weekend, maybe sooner.